Saturday, November 17, 2012

All of the below are coloured by my own, possibly flawed thesis, that there's no reason for the S&P to drop (beyond the EU-wide recession, which you should have fucking predicted in the summer) and no reason for the gold miners to drop. Except, of course, that right-wingers are in a snit about their ermagerd! terxes! -

and right-wingers are the types of people who hold gold-miners.

Anyway....

Biiwii - sentimentrader.com data. The caveat being that sentiment can get more bearish if there is a fundamental reason. So is there a fundamental reason, Gary? If not, then we're at a bottom; if so, we'd better batten down the hatches.

Bespoke - holy fuck the whole fucking world is 3-sigma down. Seriously - utilities are even almost 4-sigma down, which is funny for a defensive sector, and which makes you think the puking really is only about terxes. After all, the Utes pay the big dividends, and dividends are among the things the Negro Communist Muslim will be taking away from baby Jesus.

Salon - is it game over for Grover Norquist? I don't want to bother you with US politics articles here at this Canadian goldbug blog... but this article is actually quite pertinent to the question of whether or not Obama can come to a deal over the tax & sequestration bill.

Crash Course in Science were a very strange, weird band from the US who, I guess in the early 80s, did a lot of weird pulsating noise. It was electronic music, but wasn't intended to actually involve melodies as such. Kinda ahead of its time. Horribly so.

Here's the video (this is 1981 remember!) for Cardboard Lamb:

Anyway.

For some reason they reformed a year or two ago, as most ancient bands are wont to do, and all of a sudden became cool:

Almost as if they had to wait for the next generation to be born and grow up before anyone would be able to figure out what the fuck they were doing.

He compares this jobless claims with the post-Hurricane Katrina jobless claims, and says "give it a week or two and if it doesn't clear up then we can start to worry."

I don't exactly accept that explanation - I was under the impression that Katrina destroyed a city, while Hurricane Whoever It Was Last Week Or So only knocked out some power and damaged a subway system.

Nevertheless, NDD seems to have been calling things better than the clown brigade recently, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

However, I believe that the extremely silly (German inspired) policy of pushing austerity measures as the only policy is beginning to be rethought by the EZ. As you know, I have argued that the austerity by itself is making the situation much worse, in particular, in countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain, quite possibly others, due to the negative impact of the fiscal multipliers. We have had no comments from Germany, as yet, which suggests that caution is appropriate, especially as member states (in particular Germany) have to approve a change in policy. Furthermore, comments by Mr Rehn that Spain need only continue with its programme of structural reforms, rather than to stick to budget deficit targets (which we all know they will not adhere to) and, today, that the EZ need the participation of the IMF in a Greek bail out is difficult to reconcile, given the very differing views of the Euro group and the IMF, publicly aired earlier this week and the current German inspired policy. The EZ has a history to disappoint, but at the very least a discussion is taking place – about time !!!!!

Boockvar - an update too. Importantly:

the subsequent market selloff has the individual investor at the most bearish since Aug ’11 at 48.8 v 39.9 last week. Bulls fell to 28.8 vs 38.5, near the lowest since July according to AAII. Combine this with a very oversold market and we’re close to a short term bounce.

More than two-thirds of those polled, 68 percent, said the automatic spending cuts and tax increases would have a major effect on the economy, and 62 percent said it would be mostly negative. In addition, 44 percent of respondents said the fiscal cliff would have a significant impact on their personal financial situation and 60 percent of those said it would be mostly negative.

In Greece, we talked before when it went through 50% youth unemployment. The last figures I saw were (a shocking) 57%. So we are now pushing up towards 60% (youth unemployment). What we are looking at is something, I’m afraid, that is very, very akin to the Weimar Republic and that breakdown which happened in Germany in the early 1930s that led to Hitler.I’m not saying Hitler is coming back to haunt Europe, but what I am saying is, isn’t it truly astonishing that we have Nazism on the rise in Southern Europe?

Beyond Brics - Markets cool on China's new leaders. Really? The kids pull a snit cos there's no promise of free candy from the new Chinese leadership? You thought you'd get a new leadership council that just can't wait to hand over all the Chinese people's money to the international investment banking cartel? Or as Simon Rabinovitch says, "We are nearly eight hours into the decade-long rule of Xi Jinping, so it seems a perfect time to pass definitive judgment on his record as China’s leader."

Ritholtz - has no clue why the market's changed all of a sudden so he invokes the Deus ex Machina of the "Minsky Moment". Well, I can imagine this to be true, if this Minsky fellow is some fucking coked-up right-wing plutocrat hedge fund manager who's decided to pull a fucking snit cos Obama's going to balance the budget and force him to pay taxes to support mythical unwed negro mothers.

And in other news,

You really should subscribe to the BNN Morning Newsletter. Usually a pretty good summation of how nothing's actually happening, with a conscious recognition that most of what you hear in the media is just silly blather for no other purpose than to be heard.

Marty Cej wrote today's BNNMN, and you can tell he's heavily invested in the explorecos, by his utter disbelief of the stupidity of the market:

The World Gold Council, whose members include Ernst Stavro Blofield, Auric Goldfinger and Ron Paul, said gold demand fell 11 percent in the third quarter as slower growth in China lead to less investment and jewelry buying. Indian consumption topped China's for a second straight quarter, though the WGC said from its headquarters beneath a skull-shaped volcano on an island in the Pacific that China would be the world's top buyer by the end of the year.

You can tell he reads my blog, cos I'm also all about the skull-fortress - except in my case I was thinking of putting it in the deep Amazonian jungle, not at a fucking volcano. Then again, I work in engineering and can see problems like that.

And tangentially he says

We'll also be watching for Dell after the close, especially after an editor at Bloomberg reached deep into his memory of second-year English Poetry to come up with the headline "Death Be Not Proud as Dell to Hewlett-Packard Show PC End." The story, however, is somewhat at odds with John Donne's intent when he wrote "Death Be Not Proud" sometime around 1610.

and quite cleverly

Continuing my headline theme, I consider this one, again from Bloomberg, a winner: "Torture Shows Hackers of Damascus Turn Internet Against Rebels." If someone doesn't take "Hackers of Damascus" for the name of their band, or at least the name of their first album, they are idiots.

Starting to see big moves in a lot of stocks. SSL's down to $11. P down to $6. NGD below $10.

I guess if you were the type of guy to play warrants, you'd be in the market laughing your ass off right now, gobbling up all and sundry. Or at least waiting til the drop gets desperate, I dunno.

If only there was a blog dedicated to playing warrants....

I still see this move as a short-term snit of some kind. Nothing in the fundamentals to be driving this. Ooh, China's new leadership isn't reformist enough? Give me a break. Ooh, dividend taxes are going up in the US? That'd be a first! Ooh, Israel and Gaza aren't getting along? My god, what a sea-change in middle-east relations!

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Gold discovery rates are decreasing even as exploration spending in the industry reached a record $8 billion last year, according to Jamie Sokalsky, chief executive officer of Barrick Gold Corp., the world’s largest producer.

There were three discoveries last year, compared with 11 in 1991, and none of those can be described as “supergiant,” or holding more than 20 million ounces, Sokalsky said at a conference in Hong Kong. Breakeven costs were rising, he said today, predicting gold’s bull market shows no signs of ending.

and

“I don’t see a surge in gold production if we saw a gold price of $3,000,” Sokalsky said. “At a higher gold price, we’d still be experiencing the same challenges."

but also

“It’s getting harder to find large deposits and to get those deposits into production takes at least twice as long as it might have taken a decade ago,” Sokalsky said yesterday in an interview. “We’re not going to see new mines coming in as fast as we thought to replace old mines that are closing.”

and even

“Getting mines permitted, dealing with the government and the communities, environmental issues, all of that takes so much longer,” said Sokalsky, who took over as CEO in June after his predecessor Aaron Regent was fired. “It also costs multitudes more to build a mine and to finance that.”

No similar lungpoopage is seen in the charts for FNV and RGLD, so god knows what the heck is going on here.

GDXJ and $HUI are also having a terrible day. And yet silver is even and gold is even. So, I dunno... maybe this is just some huge hedge fund clod who's puking his entire position all in one day?

Dundee Precious Metals is normally driven heavily by ETF flows, according to my own flawed perception, yet it's not diving that badly. However, BTO has really tanked. So maybe this is just one major US hedge fund puking into the market.

In any case, time to dust off the trademarked "gold miners suck™" tags....

I had actually looked at this a few weeks ago, but only from the angle of attempting to say something funny about Tye Burt again.

But hey, look at Kinross:

Especially failing to punch through the SMA(50) is interesting.

And here's the weekly:

My god, it's in a primary uptrend all of a sudden!

My question is, should it have gone up 30% just because of dumping Tye Burt? I mean, is Tasiast worth money all of a sudden?

Anyway, dude buddy there that guy should start up a blog and write about warrants. And he should also blather about political stuff and get up on a pedestal and shoot his mouth off too, because this is the internet and reading a blog is supposed to be an endurance test, not an informative and educational way to spend the day. Fuck, they got Sesame Street for that.

Beyond Brics - Chinese people still buying gold. And speaking of which, Bull Market Run impressed me with a recent post, where they specifically mentioned Indian and Chinese gold demand. Wow - you mean they understand the supply-demand dynamic? One point in that blog's favour right there. I also really do like their charties.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Among the problems with this cartoon (and yes okay there's a joke there and I'm going to complain about the idea behind it and look quite thick) are:

1) If your neutrino detector is supposed to tell you when the sun has exploded, you probably don't want it to lie to you.

2) If you do want it to lie to you, for some reason, and want the chance of lying to be 0>x>1, there are better ways of making it happen than getting the neutrino detector to roll 2 six-sided dice. I mean fuck, now you've got to build in a motorized die-rolling machine, a camera, and some sort of visual system to look at the dice.*

So it looks like he came up with the Bayesian statistician angle first, then tried to create a situation around it.

* - though knowing him he already built all of that stuff one day so he could impress the guys at that weekend's role-playing session.

Just when you thought last week's gold and silver action was constructive, Turd Ferguson goes and blows it all to hell by calling it an outside reversal on the weekly chart and suggesting that it's very bullish for the PMs.

Actually, yes, you can go read the post without getting killed by a brain virus. Or scan through it quickly, anyway.